You may have heard of the trend called microdosing. People all over the world are taking really low doses (around a tenth of an active dose) of certain psychoactive substances in an attempt to improve creativity, boost physical energy levels, emotional balance, increase performance on problem-solving tasks and to treat anxiety, depression and addiction.

Long before the trend sprung in the Silicon Valley as the ultimate creativity enhancer, Dr James Fadiman conducted pioneer research since the 1960s, where he gives LSD and other psychedelics such as psilocybin mushrooms to people including scientists, mathematicians and architects to see how it affects creative problem-solving.

“The general response is that they feel better. There is an actual movement towards increased health or wellness. What that means, for instance, is that people who write in for anxiety seem to get help with their anxiety. People who use it for learning, improve their learning. One Ivy League student said he was using microdosing to get through the hardest math class in the undergraduate curriculum, and he did wonderfully in the class. Another young man used it for severe stuttering, and others have used it for social anxiety. One young woman, an art historian, even found that it regulated her periods and made them painless”, says Fadiman.

What microdosing seems to do is rebalance people. They improve their relationship to their body and become more attuned to their real needs. Like this, people say they get into better patterns such as sleeping better, eating healthier, and quitting addictions. “They’ve improved their relationship to their body ― or their body has improved their relationship to them”, Dr Fadiman explains and adds that there’s a lack of further research today with the restrictions of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Despite this, people all over the world are swearing by this technique by exploring the further frontiers of their consciousness and reclaiming their right to adult sovereignty over it. You can read more about Dr Fadiman’s research in his more recent book “The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide”, a how-to manual for safe and therapeutic psychedelic experiences.

In the SHAMANIC ACTIVATION COURSE, we offer a San Pedro (Echinopsis pachanoi) microdose to all our attendees that want to surrender to the power of nature in this experience. Also called Huachuma, this cactus is native to the Andes Mountains and has been used for healing and religious purposes for thousands of years by South American shamans. The active psychoactive substancw in it is mescaline, the same as in the Peyote cactus that grows mainly in Mexico.

The exact dose for each participant of the retreat will be personally adjusted as needed and they will be guided through this experience of expansion and heightened spiritual awareness by our knowledgeable teachers.

Below you can read benefits people have experienced when microdosing with San Pedro:

“… what I notice is a slightly stimulating and uplifting feeling with clear thinking. I feel less likely to block my emotions and to avoid psychological problems, but going about my day more natural and easy as I feel uplifted and noticeably happier.” @sentienttree

“The first days, I was experiencing a deep sense of calm and emotional security, total lack of any anxieties or fears. My outlook was calmly happy as were my interactions. I decided to begin a new routine of running in the mornings after my dose. My inspiration levels were increasing as the days went on, I was coming up with new ideas for my business, even drawing and painting. Never with a rushed mindset always calm and sure of my actions.” @Raddisher

"I seem to just love the therapeutic medicine these low doses give me - as with psilocybin the many alkaloid mimic serotonin and I think this is one of the most pleasant mood lifters to date that I've encountered. With San Pedro powder I'll feel for 5 minutes meditating or with my eyes closed - then go off and do something and I can come back to it again and its there. Truly an amazing spirit." @Awooga

"When a woman makes love with a man who do not know how to be present lovingly inside her womb, she is accentuating the wound"

The womb, the female uterus, has been attacked for thousands of years by the world and its rational energy that has dominated civilization, separating us from the Heart and Mother Earth.

She is attacked when a man use her to discharge all his mental compulsivity, when a men masturbate inside a woman's womb.

The same sexual act, in tantric form, is a potent form of healing. The contact with the penis of a man who has healed or who is in the conscious path of healing, who has opened his heart, who has integrated into himself the feminine energy. Then its begins to purify The female womb.

Begins to give us "new information", of Love. That is why it is very important for any woman on the path of conscious healing, to be aware of her relationships. It is not a matter of repression, of denying now the right of sexual freedom, so hard won; But of an awareness of "what we are doing"

The Goddess is the feminine energy linked to the power of her womb, which healed, unites her directly with the energy of the heart and with the Presence of Being, the whole.

It is necessary that the feminine womb be healed of all pain, of all fear and of all rancor, of the collective karma, of thousands of years of crushing of the feminine, of contempt and of aggression to the Feminine.

It is not a question of guilty. The healing of the human being demands that we understand that our history is a collective history, it is the story of the awakening of consciousness, and in that history we have all been involved in a multitude of lives.

Just as the healing of the planet requires man to open his Heart and integrate the feminine within him, the same healing requires the woman to heal her wound through the understanding of herself.

Everything is changing in the world, slowly, subtly... and the feminine is making her divine entrance, graciously. The Goddess is taking her power, balancing the world, since inevitably the healing of the Earth depends on this, of the empowerment of the feminine, of healing the feminine through self-knowledge/understanding, connection with our Womb and our Heart.

This is a process that is occurring collectively, where the Divine Feminine brings the power of Love, Healing, Acceptance and Compassion to humanity.

It is not about "feminism" is about something broader, deeper, more internal.

It is about a change of consciousness in our human existence, in a man as in a woman. A change of consciousness that reflects precisely that "dance" that Tantra understood so well. A dance of balance and love, where the feminine, under the protection and support of the masculine healed, is the energy that leads the world to a new dimension, a new perception, in connection with the divine that is in everything that surrounds us.

In order for this process to take shape in reality, women, the main channel on Earth of that feminine energy, has a main role. The woman must understand her true essence, where is her true liberation and heal all that prevents her from embodying the power of the Goddess.

For woman to access the energy of her heart, she must first heal her womb (her centers or power) to cure the ancestral wound of the feminine.

To heal the wound is to forgive, which is to truly liberate others and free ourselves. It is unleashing the illusory. The past that is only in the mind.

As long as we do not forgive, we remain tied to what we react against and it is what we will call and create in our own lives.

The woman also has to develop her masculine side/archetype, her rational and analytical mind, her left hemisphere, to balance herself. Without a development of its masculine side, the woman can not be complete on Earth and all those characteristics yin will drag her into a sea of confusion, emotionality, instability, she will be able to perceive many things, but will not be able to process them, will not be able to place them, staying in a vague and diffuse world, difficult to express. It is through the yang (masculine) characteristics but directed from its feminine nature.

On the other side, the woman must turn to the female archetype, towards the mother too. There too do the work of forgiveness and liberation that is needed. Connect with understanding that leads to the feminine essence (beyond the imbalances normally existing in every mother-daughter relationship). Beyond this reality of the relationship with the mother herself, we must understand that the archetypal feminine transcends the physical mother. That it is possible to connect with "the energy of the mother" through the Earth and also through communion with other women.

All of this moves normally to unconscious levels and it is there precisely where we could act, observing ourselves, making us aware of all that was previously hidden and that we could not see. It is a work of raising awareness.

The more women we begin to heal and to know our power rooted in the feminine, the more women will also have the opportunity to awaken to that healing and self-knowledge in the collective

What is Yoga…really? While there is no one right answer, its most cited translation is, ‘to yoke’ or to be in ‘union’ –though this translation does little to uncover and reveal its profound depths.

Yoga has been written about at great length and has innumerable associations ranging from physical techniques, heightened spiritual states and philosophical systems, but much of its modern-day usage has often erred on rather descriptive rhetoric.

English can be partly to blame, as the language is more descriptive and expository in comparison to Sanskrit's depth, which points more to the inherent nature of a thing. Similarly, the growth of the number of yoga teachers has created more interpretations of what yoga is.

Like a finger pointing at the moon, if we remain fixated upon the pointing finger we miss the experience of the moon entirely.

When delving into the mystical depths of yoga, such positive associations do little, rather they can often thwart or even misguide our understanding. If we continue to assign positive definitions, aren't we limiting what we comprehend to be yoga? In doing so, aren't we running the danger of missing the essence of yoga?

Instead of inquiring about what yoga is, is it not more appropriate to describe what it is not? Thereby we give the experience or essence of yoga more space, free from the limiting constructs and associations taken in by the mind.

Patanjali recognized this inherent limitation. In his often quoted and sourced Yoga Sutras, he states in one of the opening verses that yoga is citta vritta nirodha, roughly translating to the restraint or end of all fluctuations of the mind. Here he recognizes the danger of using positive statements to describe something inherently beyond words, but rather says it is beyond all mind (or beyond all thought) leaving the experience of yoga open to a far greater depth –that is everything beyond thought.

Yoga should not be mistaken to be the absence of thought or a thoughtless state, rather a shift away from a thought dominated experience of Self. So it is not that one needs to annihilate the mind in order for yoga to be experienced, but to see the mind as it is.

Gautama the Buddha also taught through negation, which is not negative or nihilistic, but rather one of profound understanding. Enlightenment or nirvana, he said, is the end of suffering. Knowing the complexity of experience and all its associated labels and imagery, the Buddha saw through the intricacies of the mind and without stating what enlightenment is, he pointed to what it is not, making it ungraspable by the confines of mind. The polarity of existence, seen through the divisive mind that creates separation, is a product of its inherent ignorance.

Both systems use negation as a way to bring us closer to understanding our essential nature. By leaving the core teachings as open as the sky, the freedom from labelling and association reveals a hidden truth that lies veiled behind the idea ridden mind.

This holiday season, many of us will be going through the familiar process of adopting resolutions for the New Year, setting intentions, and clearing out the old ideas that no longer serve us.

Whether that is to start the day off with a practice of gratitude, meditate every day, start journaling, or even to make a habit of smiling everyday, such practices are meant to encourage us to embody to be the change we would like to see.

Unfortunately, two weeks into January and most of us will have already dropped the practice and gone back into our old habits and routines.

Many times when we endeavour to start a new beginning, what happens is that our intention (or thought) that arises and prompts us toward change, lies on top of a powerful sub-conscious mind –the accumulation of past thought patterns– that resists the promptings to begin something anew.

The old patterns of the mind have a powerful momentum built upon through continuous identification. An old habit is so engrained within the psyche that any effort toward change threatens the old way of thinking – creating enormous amounts of resistance and struggle.

Consequently, many efforts toward change end in failure or are given up due to the inherent conflict and its associated suffering that lays at the intersection between the old ways of doing things and the new.

This many not be a revelation, as all of us have all confronted the difficulties of change and the challenges of new beginnings.

However, if we are to truly embody the change we seek – instead of continually imposing new resolutions, forcefully struggling to enforce new ways of being, we must inquire into the nature of mind and thought, so that we might come to understand the nature of the resistance that arises and through that understanding be able to more fully see what it is that is arising within.

By inquiring into the nature of the Self we begin to understand all else that would stand in our way.

Lasting change really only comes through self-understanding, as it is the means by which we see what is real and what is unreal. It is only when we understand the nature of the unreal that we can change beyond the surface of things.

This process of transformation and renewal is the wisdom that lies behind Tantra – that path which seeks to understand all that stands between you and your true Self.